Renfrew program to highlight Tigers football team

Dr. John Fair will discuss “Rip Engle, The Tigers, and The Spirit of Waynesboro,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 29, in the newly renovated wagonshed room in the visitors center at Renfrew Museum and Park.

Members of the Waynesboro Tigers, a semi-professional football team, were the hot shot players in the area. They beat similar teams in Chambersburg, Hagerstown, Martinsburg, Harrisburg and even Baltimore and Washington, D.C.“In fact,” said Fair, who holds a Ph.D., heads the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Waynesboro boy, “they clobbered them.”

“I become very nostalgic about how important the Tigers were to Waynesboro at one time and they certainly enlivened my childhood,” said Fair, the son of Mary Shank Fair and Edgar Fair and a graduate of Waynesboro High School, where he was involved in weight-lifting and body-building.

The Tigers

The team was founded in 1938 and played until the beginning of World War II, when it was suspended as players went off to combat.

In 1947, the team was reorganized, complete with team doctors and cheerleaders. By this time, the plays used by the team were derived from those developed by Charles A. “Rip” Engle, formerly a mathematics teacher at Waynesboro High School and later head coach at Brown University and mentor to Joe “JoePa” Paterno as coach at Penn State for 16 years.

This new team continued to play until 1952 and stirred the enthusiasm of the entire town’s population.

“I think it contributed to a greater sense of community and togetherness and a sense that Waynesboro was not just another town in southern Pa.,” said Fair.

The speaker

Over the years, Fair, who is an acknowledged historian of both British constitutional history and sports, has interviewed members of the Waynesboro Tigers and met with Engle’s widow and interviewed his son.

He is noted for his research on physical culture and wrote all the articles on physical culture for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He has a new book coming out, “Mr. America: The Tragic History of A Bodybuilding Icon,” and an article on “Savrola and Winston Churchill’s Search for Meaning.”

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